Switching To `Metric Time`? Duh, Okay!

May 14, 1986|By Clarence Page.

A high school science teacher in Toledo, Ohio, who was not satisfied with teaching his students facts decided to go a little further and try to teach them to think. To do this, he deliberately told them an untruth. He told them the country was switching to ``metric time.``

Hours would no longer be 60 minutes, the teacher, Dave Bourland of Toledo`s Libbey High School, announced. Instead, they would be 100 minutes. And every week would have 10 days, instead of 7. That was when Bourland got his big surprise.

The students believed him.

Not one single student questioned Bourland`s announcement, even though a little effort with pencil and paper would have shown that Bourland`s metric time plan wouldn`t work. Instead, the students simply took note of what their teacher had told them and waited for him to tell them what else was new.

``I wanted to acquaint them with the scientific method of proving a statement right or wrong,`` Bourland told me this week. ``But no one bothered to ask where the time would go.``

That`s not all. When the students went home and told their parents, Bourland got his second surprise: The parents believed him, too. Bourland found out when some of the parents called the school to ask when the new metric time would begin.

I don`t know what happened to the other parents. Perhaps they fell victim to what I call the Page Principle of Parental Puzzlement, which goes like this: Most information that kids bring home from school will be affirmed by parents, as long as they can avoid looking stupid for not knowing what the kid is talking about.

Bourland ended the experiment after a week passed without anyone`s figuring out the fraud. Reaction has been mostly favorable, he said, although one local newspaper scolded him for lying to his pupils.

I think that argument misses the point. Contrast Bourland`s story with one I saw on television last week about a youngster who has been accepted into Harvard even though he has never spent a day in a schoolhouse. He has been taught entirely at home, the news report said, by his parents in a rural cottage. The most memorable aspect of the story was that the lad attributed his academic success to the way his home education had forced him to find answers on his own.

Most of my generation went through public school with only the slightest knowledge of the contributions made to American history by blacks, Hispanics, women and labor unions. When some of us began to discover some of what had been left out, we were justifiably angry. Modern curricula have begun to make up for those oversights, but it only happens after someone raises the right questions.

And skepticism can make education more enjoyable. Rather than teach history as the memorizing of dates, imagine how much more exciting it is to consider the ``what if`` questions.

Such as, what if the South had won the Civil War? What if former President Gerald Ford had refused to pardon former President Richard Nixon?

Of course, as one of my history professors used to say: I could give you my answer.